the intimacy of collision

Bodies orbit around one another. A singing voice fills the space. Steps strike the floor. Bodies and breath intertwine in a collective release. Focusing on form and rhythm, in the intimacy of collision Dominique Tegho deconstructs “Middle Eastern” folk dances, bringing them into conversation with contemporary movement vocabularies. 

The piece shapes a dancing body that unsettles and disrupts orientalist imaginings. Three performers draw from the rhythmic structures of Dabke and the cyclical loops of Baladi, creating a dance that oscillates between anger and celebration. The performance turns toward the many iterations of the Dance of the Seven Veils, an orientalist spectacle first imagined in Oscar Wilde’s play Salome from 1893. With friction, collision, and encounter it interrogates the orientalism that has shaped perception of bodies for more than a century of Western imagination.

After the performance on June 02: Talk with the artists